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Easter

One of the most revealing and confrontational discoveries of the past century is that of the unconscious and the obscure forces that slumber in it.  It seems as if this discovery has brought it about that the forces of darkness have been unchained more than ever.  Be that as it may, in this regard we are not only contemporaries but also fellow sufferers.  We are not simple, straightforward human beings.  Every person of this time is a vessel full of contradictions.  With part of consciousness we shine light on the inner and outer world; another part remains hidden in the unconscious and leads a life of its own in the dark.  Increasingly, we are confronted with this uncomfortable truth: in every person forces are slumbering that may be destructive.  One need not be a criminal for this.  The saint knows better than any other person that he too might do anything.  And we will be wise, since we are no saints at all, to watch out for what we don’t know and don’t want to know about ourselves.

But in the depths of the soul there is not only a demon hiding that is waiting for the opportunity to do its destructive work.  Hidden under this abyss there lives in every human being—even in the criminal—a deep longing for redemption.  In the grave of the soul something is buried that is waiting for us to awaken it.  And only if the grave of the soul becomes an altar of the soul, if we seek Christ with heart and soul, will He let Himself be found and will rise from the depths.

 

Rev. Bastiaan Baan, Easter 2024

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Good Friday

When we hear the story of the Last Supper we know already what will happen and what comes next: the martyrdom, His death, and resurrection.  Of course it was not that way for His disciples when He had the meal with them.  He was speaking in riddles to them.  He kept them guessing about the future.  Every event that followed was another riddle: Gethsemane, the sleep that overcame them, the capture, the flight.  None of them was able to stand by Him to the end.  Of course not, none of us would be able to maintain our footing in such circumstances.  How could a person at that time ever foresee that the last evening meal would not only be followed by the first morning meal of the Resurrected One, and that He from now on would give Himself, day in day out, in bread and wine, to every human being who hungers and thirsts for His presence?

At the end of His life on earth, Christ indicates with an unusual word that this end is the beginning of a completely new life.  Of all the disciples only John was present as witness when this last word sounded on the cross: “It is fulfilled.”  He is the only evangelist who wrote this word from the cross down.  What is so special in these words?

Christ here used an expression that originated in the old mysteries: tetelestai.  It means something like: the goal has been reached. (telete was the ancient word for initiation.  The place where the initiation took place was called in Eleusis: telesterion.)  The expression tetelestai is no finality, but an indication of a completely new life.  From then on the initiate stood on the other side of the threshold and was at home with the Gods.  From the other side he could order life on earth according to the hermetic principle: As above, so below.  The holy order of heaven had to be reflected in life on earth.

Where was Christ after He had spoken His last words?  He too crossed a threshold, but not to go to the Gods, but to the demons and the dead.  In the three days after His death He was not in heaven, not on earth, but “in the heart of the earth.” (Mat. 12:40)  There He brought light into the hopeless existence of death and the underworld.  There the germ of a new heaven and a new earth was planted.

Since His death and resurrection every death experience can become the germ of a new life.  For whoever dies in Christ walks with Christ through death into deathless life.

 

Rev. Bastiaan Baan, Good Friday 2024

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John 8 – The Adulterous Woman

For centuries the traditional Church has tried to ban St. John’s story of the adulterous woman from the Bible.  In some Bibles it is missing even today.  Why?

Without a trace of judgment Christ forgives what a person has done.  He does not condemn.  Isn’t that a license to commit adultery?

You could compare the people who want to ban this story from the Bible with the Scribes and Pharisees, who could not imagine guilt without penalty.

This is a deeply rooted tendency that is still there in each of us.  We may not penalize the mistakes of others with stones, but we proclaim devastating judgments, which lead a life of their own in our media and make the perpetrators into culprits.  We think and speak evil about people who, in our eyes, are wrong.  We ridicule people who, in our eyes, are stupid.  But also in our day the saying is true: “Whoever among you is free of sin let him throw the first stone…”

Adultery – every human being is guilty of it.  Someone has given it name: “Cosmic adultery.”  That is what philosopher Saint Martin calls our collective separation from the divine world.  We are detached from God, and in consequence of this we are detached from everything and everyone around us.  God has not abandoned us, but we, each one of us, have turned away from Him.  By our cosmic adultery we have lost the spirit.

And only by becoming aware of the loss of the spirit grows our longing for the awakening of the spirit.

And only through Him who, like a lamb, bears the sins of the world, is the abyss bridged that separates us from God.

 

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, March 17, 2024

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Passiontide

Just as in history there are eras of blossoming that you can compare with spring tide, we are also familiar with autumn tides of humanity, when all that has bloomed dies.  Author Roland Holst expressed this sense of an approaching end with the words:

… that I was born in the autumn of a world

And have to die in it.

 

We all have death at our heels—even more, he has become our inseparable companion.  You could despair in a world where so much is doomed to death, degenerates, and falls apart.  But try to think that everything would stay the same.  Just imagine that no one and nothing would die anymore—that is perhaps the worst that could happen to us.  What is doomed to death must die, to make space for new life.

In these days the altar has become black.  This color—or rather, this absence of all color—is more than the herald of irrevocable death.  If we dare to face death, if we dare to go through the eye of the needle, we come to know a form of life that is born from death.  We then look beyond the fall of a world in which everything has to die sooner or later.  Then you can say together with the poet:

I will no longer see the blades

Nor ever bind the sheaves again

But give me faith in the harvest

For which I serve.

 

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, March 4, 2024

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Kings

Real kings are hard to find in our time.  For whoever calls himself king, or is so called, is at best a pale shadow of it, and at worst a mere caricature.  For how often isn’t the magic of a fairy tale coronation and a fairy tale marriage broken by the sobering reality of human weakness?

We have to look far into the past to find real kings—high initiates who led a people with sure knowledge, and who were able to transform this knowledge into laws carved in stone.  Their wisdom was derived from the stars according to the heavenly law: As above, so below.  The eternal script of the stars, the dictates of the heavenly hierarchies, was the source they drew from to order life on earth.  The symbol of this source of inspiration was of old the golden crown: from a world that rises far above earthly thoughts flowed their inspirations.

The Gospel shows that in his conduct the king followed the inspirations of the angelic world.  It is the angel’s message that causes the three kings to decide to return to their lands by a different way (Mat. 2:12).  How far do our ways seem to be removed from their royal way!  By trial and error, wandering and straying, we have to feel our way to our goal in life.  In our noisy world the voices of the angels are drowned out, have gone silent.  And yet, in every human being a capacity is hiding that can show us the way.  In each of us speaks the voice of conscience.  Even if we don’t want to know what our conscience is saying, it does not leave us in peace until we hear its voice.  That is the Christ voice of our conscience.  And whoever let themselves be led by this voice will sooner or later discover royal gifts, which are lying deeply hidden in us and are waiting to come to light.

 

Rev. Bastiaan Baan, January 6, 2024

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Heaven and Earth will pass away  (Mat. 24:35)

For many of us the altar is not only a familiar spot, but also a place that pulls us with an astonishing power of attraction.  One of our churchgoers once said: I don’t understand what goes on at the altar at all, but my feet bring me there every time again.  What makes the altar a place that irresistibly attracts us?

When you realize that for dozens of years countless people have made countless offerings here, week in week out, you begin to understand why this spot has such a power of attraction.  For as soon as we make our little offering, the offerings of our predecessors are also evoked—from all true Christians, from all who have died, from all who had not yet Christ.  At the altar all sacrificial capacity is bundled, from the visible and the invisible congregation.

A saying from Greek antiquity expresses this in the words: Stronger than an impregnable fortress is an altar.  Of course, one did not mean the stone or wooden altar that sooner or later will decay, but what happens at the altar.  What is it that makes the altar an impregnable fortress armed against all attacks of the adversary powers?

It is our offerings, which are justified before God.  Even though sometimes we have no more to give than our deficient thoughts, our imperfect love, our weak will power—it is irradiated by the offerings of our predecessors, but even more by the Christ sacrifice, which He brings for us to the end of the world.  And also when every altar and every temple, also when heaven and earth have passed away, as an impregnable fortress our offering continues to exist.

 

Rev. Bastiaan Baan, December 10, 2023

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Where is the New Jerusalem?

These days we all live in two very different worlds, which are more or less separated from each other.  The one thrusts itself upon us; the other is less obvious but no less real.  We always have to make an effort to recognize that other reality.

A noisy world of power, money, and violence, in which the lie reigns, drowns out the soft forces of truth and love, so that it seems as if the lie has not only the loudest word, but also the last word.  The noisier the world around us is, the more silent is that other, hidden world.  But these two exist side by side, each with its own reality.

And we—each of us has the choice of the world we want to live in.  Here applies the rule: Like recognizes like.  The force of attraction of what belongs together enables each one of us to create our own reality, even though we are citizens of two worlds.  Thus there is not only a declining, but also a rising world.  The New Jerusalem is no fata morgana, no dot on the horizon, but a reality that becomes recognizable for everyone who seeks the truth and generates love.

Before the countenance of God that is the only reality that has a justified existence.  An old proverb says: Not noise, but love penetrates to God’s ear.[*]  Because just like for human beings, for God it is also true that like recognizes like.  For those who seek truth and love with all their heart, He lets Himself be found.

 

Rev. Bastiaan Baan, November 26, 2023

[*] Non clamor, sed amor sonat in aure Dei.

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“WHO CAN STAND UP TO IT?”  (Rev. 6:17)

November, the month of those who have died.

In these days death is omnipresent—not in the lofty rest that often characterizes death, but in the devastating battle that takes place between embittered peoples: hatred facing hatred, revenge facing revenge.  The whole world watches with powerless rage or with powerless despair.  In such a hopeless fight, taking place before our eyes, how can you still do something to create a counterweight?

These days I have to think of individuals who in similar situations looked annihilation in the eye, and in the depths of despair created a sign of hope.  These individuals usually did not appear before the footlights.  They did their work in silence.  And if they had not left their visible footprints, they would have been long forgotten.  Such a person was Etty Hillesum during the Second World War.  She became known because of the diaries she left behind after her death.  How did she do it—creating a counterweight in a world of death and depravation?  She wrote in her diary:

“This is really our only moral task: cultivating great plains of rest in ourselves—ever more rest, so that one can emanate this rest again to others.”

Our apocalyptic time, when the old certainties are taken away from us, faces us with the question: Who can stand up to it?

This one thing we can do: “Cultivating great plains of rest in ourselves—ever more rest, so that one can emanate this rest again to others.  The more rest there is in human beings, the more rest there will also be in this excited world.” [*]

Rev. Bastiaan Baan, November 12, 2023

 

*] Etty Hillesum suffered and died in German concentration camps during World War II.  Her diaries were posthumously published: An Interrupted Life, the Diaries 1941-1943.

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Flame

Every human being has a flame, that must not be quenched. Perhaps we should really say: Every human being is a flame, that must never be quenched. This is the flame with which we come out of the fire of the spirit when we are born. It is the greatest art of all to keep this fire burning our whole life long—not only in joy, but also in grief; not only in strength, but also in weakness. Also when you are sick, even if you are mortally ill, the fire can still smolder under the ashes.

There are, however, countless ways to choke this flame and extinguish it. The material world can make a slave of us, a slave of money and possessions, of power and violence, of intoxication and addiction, which make us forget what our task is in this life.

John, the greatest among all human beings, fore-lived, fore-suffered, and fore-died for us how we can keep the inner fire burning. Always, down to our time today, he has been “the burning and shining lamp” (Jn. 5:35), who gives us a radiant example of how we can preserve our flame. In one word John sums up what we need to do: Metanoeite, which means: Change your hearts and minds. (Mt. 3:2) This flame word tells us: Do not stop moving on the way. The flame can only keep burning if every time again you dare leave behind whatever threatens to chain you to the dying earth existence. With this disposition you will one day rise out of the ashes like a Phoenix.

Metanoeite:
Mensch, so du etwas bist                                         Human Being, if you are truly something,
So bleib ja nur nicht stille stehen.                         Then do not stay there standing still.
Man muss von einem Licht                                      From one light you must go
Fort in das andere gehen.                                        Forth to the other light.
(Angelus Silesius)

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, July 9, 2023

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“He must increase, I must decrease.”

The ego is the shadow of a great light.  In a world where egoism reigns supreme we often imagine: the ego, that am I.

But if that is the only reality, what is then left of us at the end of our life?  When someone becomes old and decrepit, gradually all the capacities disappear on which our ego is based.  Nothing happens of itself anymore, until we eventually become dependent on the help of other people.  The light of self-consciousness weakens, flickers, and goes out.  What is then left of us?

What is left on earth is what we call the mortal remains, an empty husk that soon falls apart.  Earth to earth; ash to ash.

But death is much more than the inglorious end of life on earth.  It is the time when the wheat is separated from the chaff.  As the shadow of the ego fades, the light of the Spirit grows.  Christ stands at every deathbed and receives the harvest of every human life.  Only then does the dying person recognize: Christ is the light of my shadow.

Countless people live as if there will never be an end to their ego, until the irrevocability of the end of life cannot be ignored anymore and there is no longer a way back—only forward, through the eye of the needle.

We don’t need to wait for that moment.  We can also try, in the midst of life while we are fully engaged in our everyday existence, to begin to walk this way forward.  Then we begin to realize: I am very small, and the world that stands behind me is very large.  The greatest of all people on earth, who became the smallest of all, let the light of his shadow manifest with the words: “He must increase, I must decrease.”

Then only, if these words are fulfilled in life and death, is the promise fulfilled: “Christ in me.”

 

Rev. Bastiaan Baan, July 3, 2023.

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